If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories

by Paul Park

If Lions Could Speak is the first collection from Paul Park, acclaimed author of The Starbridge Chronicles, Coelestis, and The Gospel of Corax. Subtle, stylish, at once forthrightly simple and ingeniously complex, the pieces gathered here are compelling and penetrating explorations of cultural difference and psychological crisis, regret and reconciliation. It is a marvelous literary labyrinth, a realm of memory palaces, eerie doppelgangers, terrifying theocracies, implosive revelations. Here time travel, sordid and ludicrous, becomes emblematic of how all lives are led; here, disease is an index to how the past is rewritten; here, the Other, extravagantly alien or simply alienated, can collapse into the Self with the suddenness of a lethal gunshot. Sometimes sardonically hilarious, sometimes gravely humane, always fiercely shocking, these stories constitute one of the finest bodies of short fiction by any contemporary SF writer. "Paul Park's short stories are subtle, blunt, funny, distressing, strange, true--all these qualities, often all at once--they are like those dreams or nightmares that seem to plumb right to the meaning of things. In other words, beautiful fiction." --Kim Stanley Robinson "Genre writing is both a liberation and a confinement. If those who don't read science fiction could discover Paul Park, they would find a writer as complex, as skillful, as ambitious and as many-faceted as any they will find under any rubric. I hope this collection will help them discover him. The rest of us can simply open and enjoy." --John Crowley "Paul Park does not remind us of James Sallis or Marcel Proust; the mark of genius is that it never makes us recall anyone else, not even earlier selves." --Gene Wolfe

196 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2002

About the author

Paul Park (born 1954) is an American science fiction author and fantasy author. He lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children. He also teaches a Reading and Writing Science Fiction course at Williams College. He has also taught several times at the Clarion West Writing Workshop.

Park appeared on the American science fiction scene in 1987 and quickly established himself as a writer of polished, if often grim, literary science fiction. His first work was the Starbridge Chronicles trilogy, set on a world with generations-long seasons much like Brian Aldiss' Helliconia trilogy. His critically acclaimed novels have since dealt with colonialism on alien worlds (Coelestis), Biblical (Three Marys) and theosophical (The Gospel of Corax) legends, a parallel world where magic works (A Princess of Roumania and its sequels, The Tourmaline, The White Tyger and The Hidden World), and other topics. He has published short stories in Omni Magazine, Interzone and other magazines.

Reviews

[Sara]

The tourist
want to truck what
abscence future
harting past
autmn trust
voluger matter to travel to explain
voluger matter to be return
the forgin flower dies inside
even the smell of wood run by
what you are
what
tourist
ma heart die in yr past
yr oranpe fall from the tree
trust
what i trust
even ma pride lost
and waht at the last
want
what
crazy stone
in another galaxy wher the plant gril the past
any future y want
olive trust that
garp grap
what
y couldnt respect ma wishes
and y r tourist
that all
ma tears hold my step
go to yr warld
go in yr ward
i havnt time to ya
i have yr pic in meror corner
and lost love letter box
go to yr belong
i cant trust

[Tulpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Tourist ***** - Flawless story. I have re-read it several times. On a sentence level, this story has a way of blindsiding me with revelations and recontextualizations that are so deftly handled that I am awed by the entire thing. It manages to find an emotional core to time travel.

The Breakthrough **** - It's almost a horror story, the way it develops and unfolds, culminating in a final, terrible revelation at the end.

A Man on Crutches *** - Meh. Unmemorable. Not every story is bound to work.

Get a Grip **** - Almost phildickian. At this point in the collection, I am beginning to see a unifying theme underlying these stories.

untitled 4 *** - A good story, but it did not leave much of an impression. Still well worth a read.

Tachycardia ** - I didn't care for this at all. Skip.

Christmas in Jaisalmer ** - Another minor story. Better than the last one, not striking, nor does it shock me from a passive state.

Self Portrait, With Melanoma, Final Draft **** - great piece of metatextual intrigue.

If Lions Could Speak ***** - It's the title story, so it would have to be great, right? This story is. The central conceit of this story is that the author has difficulty making the alien intelligible but still fundamentally alien. That the goal is to make the last page incomprehensible to someone who did not read the rest of the story. But, in writing about this constantly frustrated goal, he also manages to create a convincingly alien perspective. One totally unlike how humans perceive the world. Just as the story's text is a synecdoche for the story itself, the story itself is metonymic with the entire collection, which is thematically about pulling perspectives away from the human and rational to a sort of alien rationality, incommensurable with our own, but just barely perceptible if you stick through the entire narrative.

The Lost sepulcher of Huascar Capac **** - The preoccupation with altern perspectives continues here unabated. A blind person with an imagined city of memory palaces.

The Last Homosexual *** - Interesting, a very traditional 'what if' scenario for a sci fi story. What if our biological science was founded on a preoccupation with sin and religiosity. Somewhat nightmarish to imagine.

Bukavu Dreams ** - Nothing worked here.

Rangriver Fell **** - An excerpt from a novel, and yet it works well on its own. The way careful word choice makes alien language intelligible is brilliant, as usual. That is perhaps what you should take away from this collection. Overlong as a short story, but perfect as a part of a novel. I am reminded of parts of Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Varied and Entertaining

I have read several novels by Paul Park, all of which I enjoyed, but I was ignorant of the existence of his short stories. Park is an interesting writer in that he slips between genres, something which I can appreciate. I may have mentioned this with my Bradbury review but I really admire writers who don't trap themselves into fishbowls. After all, a fishbowl is a terrible thing to trap oneself in...ahem, romantic women's fiction writers. Regardless, Park is excellent in telling a story in 12 pages or less.

I will not describe each story in this work. Quite honestly, I did not even enjoy each story. As a whole, however, the majority were excellent. The stories themselves are a maze of reality, time travel, dreams, near death experiences and alternate universes.

Paul Park is an intelligent writer and at times this can be difficult for an average reader. He is also a very subtle writer but I admit that this pleases me after recent reads in which object is made a little too clear and therefore lacks a story.

I will finish by saying that short stories have become a new hobby of mine. A busy schedule does not walk hand in hand with lengthy novels. Short stories are a nice escape without much commitment on the readers part.

[Shauna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some nice original ideas, well executed.